The NYPD also reacted to the slaying by beefing up security at the Pakistani Consulate and Mission to the United Nations, and at airlines and banks with Pakistani ties.

Meanwhile, in the Queens neighborhoods of Jackson Heights and Astoria and along Brooklyn’s Coney Island Avenue, locals gathered in Urdu-language bookstores and Pakistani restaurants.

The news from their homeland – gleaned from phone calls and satellite-TV broadcasts – was grim.

“I called my family this morning, and they said they are not stepping out of the house,” Queens restaurant owner Tariq Hamid said of relatives in Islamabad and Lahore. “People have set fires. Cars are burning.”

Throughout the day, Pakistani immigrants sat facing the television at Hamid’s Jackson Heights restaurant, Roti Boti Shaheen, set along a stretch of Pakistani businesses on Broadway between 72nd and 74th streets.

Hamid said he had catered Bhutto events at the Pakistani Embassy.

On television were images of Bhutto’s plain wooden coffin borne aloft by supporters, and rioting and flames erupting in the streets of Islamabad.

“I wanted to cry when I saw it,” customer Michael Parvez, 51, said of the broadcasts.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future now.”

Community leader Bazah Roohi, who was a member of Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party, said she was 17 when political opponents shot her in the leg after she opened a party office in her native Lahore.